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    You Should Pity Us Instead: Stories
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    You Should Pity Us Instead: Stories
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    You Should Pity Us Instead: Stories
    Ebook265 pages4 hours

    You Should Pity Us Instead: Stories

    By Amy Gustine

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    “From the absurdly comic to the acutely moving”—eleven fearless stories of love, friendship, faith and family under siege (The New York Times Book Review).
     
    Stretching from nineteenth century Ellis Island to twenty-first century Gaza and suburban Ohio, “these 11 stories, each ambitious in scope, drop us into one nerve-racking situation after another . . . inhabiting a wide range of voices” (San Francisco Chronicle).
     
    In “Coyote” a mother’s need to protect her toddler spirals into a dangerous obsession. “Prisoners Do” follows two married doctors who find temporary escape in a discomforting affair. An Israeli woman risks more than she imagines when she attempts to reclaim her captive child from militants in “All the Sons of Cain.” “Half-Life” uncovers the devastating secret behind a nanny’s chosen profession; in “An Uncontaminated Soul” a haunted and lonely cat lady’s impulsive rescue of two more kittens proves to be a heartbreaking turning point; and in the title story, an atheist family from Berkley relocates to the conservative Midwest to confront the consequences and limits of their beliefs.
     
    “Brave, essential, thrilling, each story in You Should Pity Us Instead takes us to those places we’ve never dared visit before” (Ben Stroud). “They detonate on target, literary grenades of resounding impact . . . bursting with startling insights, stabbing dialogue, ambushing metaphor, and stunning moments of dissonance” (Booklist).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJan 18, 2016
    ISBN9781941411209
    Author

    Amy Gustine

    Amy Gustine is the author of the short story collection You Should Pity Us Instead, which was a finalist for the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction. Her stories and essays have also appeared in The Chicago Tribune's Printers Row Journal, Black Warrior Review, The Kenyon Review, and many other venues. Her work has received Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology.

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    Reviews for You Should Pity Us Instead

    4/5

    15 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this collection of short stories, somehow the author managed to be both tragic and hilarious.
    • 5/5
      I was definitely wowed by this—the thing I kept thinking was, these are really grown up stories. This is kind of why I don't read much YA, and I know I'm painting with an overly broad brush but I trust the folks who know what I mean to make the distinction here. These are stories of really uncomfortable complexity, ambiguity, that sense you get when you've lived long enough to realize that there are no pat resolutions to our story arcs. The themes she revisits—parenting and being someone's child, often simultaneously; loneliness; guilt; ways we compensate for what life has offered us so far—are treated with a lot of intelligence and sensitivity.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Gustine’s eleven stories are universally good and many have considerable merit. They are well constructed, focusing on mundane situations using well-drawn characters, who experience various forms of realization—often in the last sentences. To her credit, she refrains from offering pat solutions for her characters’ situations. Instead her writing is subtle and nuanced, asking her readers simply to bear witness to things that superficially would appear to be quite ordinary but are often fraught with underlying tensions.Some of the best are as follows:In “You Should Pity Us Instead,” Gustine offers families with polar opposite views of religion—one Christian and another atheist. Molly and Simon discover that in Middle America, people can express a variety of religious beliefs, but atheism is just not one of them. The title of the story comes from the solution that Molly offers to her daughters to avoid the stigma of being athiests. People should pity us because, unlike them, we were not blessed with having faith.“Prisoners Do,” gives us Mike, a radiologist, whose wife has become incapacitated from a stroke. Although this is devastating, the family seems to be managing well, offering support and comfort to each other. Mike has been carrying on an affair with a colleague, whose mother will soon be getting a diagnosis of terminal cancer. On a visit to Mike’s home to get his diagnosis, she learns how supportive his family is, despite the tragedy, a lesson one thinks she may adopt in her relationship with her dying mother. Mike’s response to her telling him that “you can’t live on bread” is telling—“Sure I can. Prisoners do.” In “Half-Life,” Sarah, has “aged out” of foster care and is now working as a nanny. Her disadvantaged childhood notwithstanding, Sarah has matured into a responsible and caring adult and, with the help of her employers, has achieved a measure of independence. Unfortunately, she learns just how precarious her situation is, but one senses that she has the character necessary to land on her feet. "When We're Innocent," tells of a father who travels across the country to pack up his daughter’s belongings following her suicide. He meets her neighbor and begins to sense that he may not have known his daughter as well as he otherwise thought. “An Uncontaminated Soul,” follows Lavinia, a woman living alone in a house full of cats. Being confronted by this type of extreme behavior, most would react much like her neighbor does and dismiss her as an eccentric. Instead Gustine succeeds in showing us a sympathetic picture of a loving and caring person coping with life as she choses to live it."All the Sons of Cain," is the story of an Israeli woman whose adopted son has been kidnapped by Hamas. People are outside her home protesting since Hamas released a video showing him claiming to be converting to Islam. She is determined to enter Gaza and retrieve him, but along the way, she experiences unexpected events that change her plans and offer an opportunity for another chance at motherhood.“Goldene Medene,” enters the mind of a doctor working in a boring assembly line type job on Ellis Island. His task is just to diagnose certain eye infections and reject immigrants who are infected. He fantasizes about a young redheaded girl who reminds him of an ex-lover. He would teach her about America and she would them become his out of a sense of gratitude.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Life is messy, we know that and sometimes just so called normal life can be difficult. Add an extraordinary event and all bets are off, what do we do, how do, we cope? The people in these stories are just regular people, at least in most of these stories, confronted with a situation that causes a strong emotion, upsets the applicant. Yet, life goes on and how they handle things and move forward is a common theme in these stories. The title story, usually the strongest in a collection, proved to be a favorite, giving me much to think about. Double themed, questions of faith but also begging the question, can one taken out of his environment, his culture, every truly thrive? An Uncontaminated Soul, is about a cat lady who has alienated her whole family. Prisoners Do, show there is more than one way to be a prisoner. A few didn't work for me but the most notable thing for me about this collection is that when I was reading these stories, I would sometimes forget I was reading a short, felt more like the beginning of a novel. That so rarely happens that I found it impressive. As was this collection as a whole.

      1 person found this helpful